Cubeland
by Deli73
Summary: A narrative about Minecraft. Only the first chapter is finished so far. Chapter 1: Floating Trees


When I woke up, there were three things I noticed right away. First, I had no clue where I was. Second, I couldn't remember anything. And third, there was something very wrong with this place.  
As my eyes adjusted and my mind cleared, I noticed what it was that had set me off. Everything in this place was packed neatly into cubes, about half my height in each direction. They seemed to be perfectly aligned with each other as well. The overall feel of the place wasn't artificial, though. Besides the odd shape, it seemed like a regular grassy hillside, with a few trees here and there.  
The dirt cubes seemed stacked so that you could see the side of some of the grassy cubes, and the grass appeared to be a little over a thumb's width deep before subsiding to the dirt. Still, the place seemed wrong. It wasn't natural for everything to be so perfect. Nature was chaotic, unpredictable, and certainly not uniformly cubical. Even the trees had perfectly square trunks, and the leaves and branches seemed to be trimmed into a cube shape as well, although there was a bit of shape variety within the cube. It seemed like someone had just come through here and trimmed and shoved and pushed everything until it was arranged cubically. I couldn't help wondering who would do such an odd thing, and why the dirt cubes weren't spilling off the sides. There didn't seem to be anything holding them up, and the soil certainly seemed soft enough to fall.  
Before I could think any more about that, though, I heard a familiar sound. Familiar, perhaps, because I had encountered farm animals before. Thanks to my amnesia, I couldn't really remember anything specific, but I knew the basics of how life worked, and I knew when I'd seen something before. It was the oinking of a pig. Turning around, I saw that the pig also seemed to be a somewhat cubelike shape. Its main body was a rectangular prism, as were its four legs. Its head was a cube, with its nose sticking out a bit in a similarly cubical fashion, and its tail appeared to be smashed into its butt. I put my hand out to pet the creature, and it pulled away shyly. Suddenly I noticed that, to my horror, my own hand had been reshaped! Each segment of my fingers was a rectangular prism, bending relative to the others normally, and the rest of my hand seemed to be a flat-ish rectangular prism.  
For a second, my mind went on a tangent as I realized that I had a limited vocabulary to describe this situation, and my thoughts were beginning to sound redundant. Determined not to be distracted by this, I decided to give these strange things names. The cubes of dirt, wood, leaves, and such, I would call blocks. After all, that's what they were, and "dirt block" was considerably more concise than "1-meter cube of dirt".  
I took a deep breath and reminded myself that I couldn't get anything done if I got lost in self-conversation. I had no clue whether anyone else was here, (although I suspected whoever made this place wouldn't have simply abandoned it) so I began to think about what I could do to survive in this place. First and foremost, I'd need food and shelter. Looking around, I saw many more animals, and I realized that if I could get a weapon of some sort, and get supplies for a decent fire, nutrition shouldn't be too much of a problem. As for shelter, I could probably build myself a little cabin out of the wood from these trees.  
I began to search for fallen logs to use as firewood, but quickly found that small non-cubical objects were extremely rare here. Improvising, I dug through the leaves and snapped a few large branches off a tree. I continued to do this for a few more trees, and in a short while gathered enough firewood for a couple of days. There was a block of stone nearby, on which I sharpened a twig into a whittling tool. Using this, I crafted myself a crude axe, and set to work chopping down a tree. After cutting through the trunk, however, instead of the tree falling over, a single block of wood crumbled into medium-sized chunks (I noted these were not cubes), and oddly, the rest of the tree seemed intact, even though the upper half of it was floating! Shaking off my confusion, I harvested the rest of the tree by chopping each of the blocks.  
As I began wondering how I would put the wood together into a house without any nails, the wood turned to dust and was sucked into my hand in an odd kind of tornado. I was now holding five tiny cubes of wood, which looked a lot like the blocks of the tree I'd just chopped down. I gripped one between my fingers, and found that it was solid and felt much like regular wood. I accidentally dropped it out of my hand, and the moment it hit the ground it expanded until a single block from the original tree trunk sat in front of me. I blinked in surprise. This was the weirdest thing I'd seen in this place so far, and that was saying a lot.  
I looked back to my hand, only to find that the other logs had disappeared. However, simply by thinking of them, I caused them to reappear in my hand. I practiced making them disappear and reappear for a bit, figuring this would be a useful skill to carry many things at once. I managed to use my whittling tool on the wood logs to carve out some wooden planks. I fashioned some crude wooden nails, which I used to nail them together. Although I wasn't attempting to, I found that I had formed the planks into a block. Four of them, in fact, with not a single plank left over.  
After harvesting some more wood, I constructed a few more of these, enough to build a small cabin. I realized, looking at it, that a door would be useful. I had just enough planks left over from the trees I'd mined earlier to make one, and so I did. It had a little hole at the top so I could see outside, and a crude handle. I carved it and the block next to it so that the handle would have to be turned before the door could be opened. This way, animals couldn't get into my house. I found a couple of sheep a few dozen blocks away, and managed to shear off some wool. I then fashioned a small bed out of the wood and wool. I noted that it was getting dark, and I should probably get some rest. I was feeling very tired…


End file.
